The 27th September was in some ways a sad day for me. It was the last of the UKOUG Management and Infrastructure Special Interest Group meetings. This SIG was dedicated to looking at how you cope with Oracle as part of a large or complex organisation. The last audience was bijou and compact but the speakers were cracking, as is confirmed by the excellent feedback everyone received from the post event critique forms.

It’s always been a SIG with a small crowd come that came along, but it was also a SIG that some of us were screaming out for. Those SIGs and meetings dedicated to the hard-core technical sides of the Oracle RDBMS are of course great and much appreciated. But for those of us trying to manage a couple of thousand instances of Oracle/application server, or trying to look after the database within the sort of corporate IT forest that FTSE 100 organisations have to have, some of us were really keen to better understand the rest of the IT infrastructure, methods to look after such large Oracle estates and also the human side of things – that word “management”. I know that the word “management” in the title put a few people off the events, but for others it was the management side (human AND technical) we desperately wanted.

So, why has it ended? Well, it hasn’t really – we are merging with the RAC&HA SIG, chaired by David Burnham and his deputies. There is a lot of crossover between our areas and we found we were often using the same speakers. You do not tend to have RAC if you are not a large oracle site and you tend to be very interested in High Availability if you have a lot of Oracle stuff to look after. So, from next year, we will be the AIM SIG – availability, Infrastructure and Management SIG. It might not be a snappy label but it describes what we will be about. Details of this new SIG will be discussed at the conference in December, anyone with any thoughts on the subject is more than welcome to contact me.

This leaves me with one important task and that is to note my thanks and indebtedness to some of those who helped with the SIG.
The UKOUG staff have been great at supporting the events, especially (during my stint) Michelle Ericsson (who is now doing funky DJ stuff in the USA) and Marisa Harris, who picked up our SIG for this last meeting and was great at hearding her errant Chair and Deputy Chair into doing what we needed to do.

We have had a succession of good guys from Oracle help us out. Tony Clements was our first and longest serving Oracle buddy and Simon Moreton took up the cause after Tony went to pastures new. Mike Edgington pitched in at short notice when Simon was not available to us for this last meeting, even presenting. Special thanks also go to Andrew Bulloch who has been fantastic at giving or organising talks for us by Oracle on Enterprise manager and Grid.

Finally and most importantly I’d like to thank Neil Chandler. Neil has been the deputy chair since the SIG started and is probably – no, IS – the person who has done the most to support the M&I SIG through it’s life. Neil’s one of those people who does not push himself to the fore as he should (except maybe in the pub), resisting presenting and firmly holding one step back from being the chair. I don’t know why, he presents very well and he knows a lot of stuff.

To everyone who came to any of the meetings and especially those who allowed themselves to be drafted into presenting duties, thank you very much indeed.